Project & Blog: MOUTH (Edia Connole & Scott Wilson)

 

As the academic spotlight shifts from the effects of eating - demonstrable in renewed interest in areas such as fat and anorexia studies - to the affects of eating (the posthuman, vibrant matter, sensory studies, etc.), the very tactility and phenomenal nature of such sensory activity sometimes seems in a crisis of disappearance under the weight of its own glosses. Enter, however, the collaborative project MOUTH, comprising of Edia Connole and Scott Wilson, which stubbornly refutes this fear through a challenging and unique mode of praxis. Slated as "an actionist art project in culinary divinomics", MOUTH currently performs provocative and spectacular gastro-theoretical fea(s)ts in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

 

MOUTH's most recent project of June 2013, teaming up with artist Jessie Pressley Jones and the Korean Society of Ireland under the umbrella of Dublin public art initiative The Prosperity Project, saw them co-host and co-cater the paradoxically sumptuous Scarcity Banquet. Entitled "LAND", after iconic Korean writer Pak Kyung-Ni's 25-year literary production of the same name (Toji), the culinary experiment radiated from the concepts of hunger and famine which haunt both the Irish and Korean cultural memory. LAND explicitly engaged with the Korean notion of han, which is "formed from sentiments of loss and rage at the severance of wholeness and continuity between self and history", in order to offer a radical restaging of hunger, dining, the social, the political.

 

In the pointed absence of famine, a lush dining hall in Dublin's centre bore witness to dish upon dish of things-we-do-not-eat (grass, acorns, ox heart) and things-we-dare-not-eat (worms, rat) served with artistry appealing to the contemporary gourmand and defiantly celebrated across long, festive tables. And to intensify the experience/ordeal and capitalising upon the multi-sensory nature of the event, Wojtek Doroszuk’s short film Festin - featuring the gradual, seemingly inexorable consumption of a heavily-laden, seventeenth-century banquet by a host of non-human actors - looped endlessly against a back wall in a warped reflection of the night's consumption.

"Hunger changes the world, transgresses the taboos that structure social identities and hierarchies, radically changing perspectives on what should and should not be eaten, and with whom one can and cannot eat. ... Moving from han to MOUTH, then, in the wake of the dead and insurgency of the land, this the latest installment of The Prosperity Project marks the desire for a banquet in which living and eating well is the best tribute and revenge."

Further information on LAND can be found at The Prosperity Project website. More on MOUTH and upcoming projects can be found via their MOUTH blog, which also accommodates records of past events, including some texts from the P.E.S.T. symposium of 2012 (which we blogged about here), and a talk given by Michael O'Rourke at the LAND event (forthcoming). Previous banquets include: "En Soiree Culinaire par Georges Bataille, pour RLII", exploring the ecstasy on the cusp of horror (and vice-versa) of Georges Bataille; a sacrilegious "Blackened Mass for Quentin Meillassoux" in which the mouth plays divinity; an irreverent "test of faith" in the ascetic tradition; and others.

 

Conferences: Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, Plymouth, 13 April 2013; and Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, Manchester, 25-26 April 2013

For the brave amongst us, April 2013 presents a cornucopia of UK conference choices to whet the appetite of the serious horror buff. On 13 April, Plymouth University hosts a one-day symposium entitled Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance, designed "to explore, interrogate and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through the paradigms of performance, as well as models of performance through the quintessential zombie activities of eating and walking". Contributors are asked to focus on the contemporary (rather than historical) zombie mythos, and are encouraged to take an interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of topics from the ethics of survival in zombie landscapes to zombie gaming and acting dead.

The deadline for proposals to this symposium is set for 30 November of this year. All delegates will also be invited to a zombie film festival which takes place the evening of 12 April and will have the option to participate in an "early morning performance, Just after Dawn of the Dead, in the streets of Plymouth, followed by a conference breakfast".

Manchester-based creative writing and literature collective Hic Dragones follows up zombie marches with a like-minded conference focus, Cannibals: Cannibalism, Consumption and Culture, on 25-26 April 2013. Not quite as specifically concentrated on contemporary modes, this two-day conference seeks papers from all disciplines which address cannibalism in any setting, "from contemporary horror film to Eucharistic devotion, from Freudian theory to science fiction" and beyond. It seeks proposals on topics such as theorisations of cannibalism, maternal infanticide and eating the enemy. The deadline for proposal submission is set at 31 December 2012.

Article: Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"

Just for this month, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is offering the the whole content of their newest issue of Spring 2012 - entitled "Becoming Media", edited by Jen Boyle and Martin Foys" - for free download. Contributions include Eugene Thacker's "Wayless Abyss: Mysticism, Mediation and Divine Nothingness" and a fascinating cross-media experiment by Whitney Anne Trettien, "Plant Animal Book: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits", which is accompanied by an additional digital essay-cum-gloss to be read relationally with the postmedieval text.

Julia Reinhard Lupton's quirky and reflective article "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt" is another postmedieval offering in this issue available online throughout March. Lupton spices up seventeenth-century Hannah Woolley's cookbook The Queen-like Closet (first published in 1670) through a peculiar comparative proximity with Hannah Arendt's concept of "judgment", carefully filtered through the register of actor-network theory and object oriented ontology. Through such a perview, Lupton encourages not only a wider reading of Arendt's philosophy but also (and perhaps more primarily) a subtle re-evaluation of the generally quotidian task of cooking and the tactile engagements which form the basis for judgment in the course of preparing food for a table. 

"Bringing the two Hannahs to the same table helps me unfold the preparation of meals as engaging at once a worldly environment and social scripts, setting the scenes in which action, work and labor enter into the most intimate proximity, without, however, losing their distinctions altogether."

 

Journal: Parallax, Issue 66 (call for papers)

Interdisciplinary journal Parallax has announced a call for papers for forthcoming issue 66, "bon appetit" in 2013, guest edited by Lynn Turner and Lindsay Kelley. Focusing on eating in order to interrogate the limits, porousness and regulation of the body, the journal's proposed theme raises ample scope for reading the alimentary as a practice which is fraught and problematic. Possible subjects include "eating well" (Derrida) and "killing well" (Haraway), "mess mates at table" (Haraway), survivalist eating in cultures of global war, cannibalism, abjection, totemism, orality and/as sexuality, animal and sexual differences, multispecies ethnography, speculative food futures and meal time.

"Far from an elementary basic need, the alimentary addresses a range of pressures, politics and phantasies regarding who, what and how we eat. Indeed, when the mouth is as invested in expression as ingestion, and when ingestion takes in identifications as readily as proteins we might further ask after what is called eating. ... [T]his issue of parallax opens up the alimentary and its nourishing, disgusting, and beastly capacities. We seek work that critically or experimentally illuminates how biopolitics and food science, the mouth and the oral, and the contributions of plants and animals come together to redefine what it means to eat."

Abstracts should be submitted by 1 October 2011. Visit the journal's general website to see a list of current and other forthcoming issues of Parallax.

Article: Snowden Wright, "Young, Male, Straight -- and Anorexic"

If anything, Snowden Wright's autobiographical account of anorexia during his puberty (written in the now classic genre of internet-as-confessional) realises the relentless quality of bodily change and the militant expectation of its incidence.

If we could be said to assume a tendency towards corporeal movement, this story of bodily regulation as 'fun house grotesquerie' - whether successful or not - begs questions concerning the limits of corporeal control, its reception and its patrol.

"The doctor administered a battery of tests that revealed my body was frozen at the cusp of puberty, my voice refusing to deepen into adulthood, my muscles failing to develop into those of a man. Adolescence had become a kind of incarceration -- when all I wanted was to escape. But I learned to understand my anorexia as an immature and almost fatal type of rebellion."

Read his article, published on 27 December 2010, online at Salon.com.